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Thursday, December 12, 2013

Treating yourself with compassion helps you change for the better.

I read a book
that compared the entrepreneurial communities in Silicon Valley and the Boston
area.In the early 1970s, both regions
had a large number of high-tech companies.By the late 1980s, though, there was a thriving community of startup
companies in Silicon Valley, while the Boston area had a smaller number of
large companies, many of which were struggling to survive.

One of the striking differences between the regions was
their tolerance of failure.In the
Boston area, people in the high tech community were reluctant to go out on
their own and start a new company, because if they failed, they felt it would
count strongly against them when they looked for another job.In contrast, in Silicon Valley, new companies
failed all the time, and it was expected that an entrepreneur might fail
several times before having some success.

At the surface, it is tempting to say that the cultures of
Silicon Valley and Boston promoted a different level of fear of failure.An interesting paper in the September, 2012
issue of Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin by Juliana Breines and Serena Chen suggests that the
difference might actually lie in the self-compassion promoted by each region.

Self-compassion is the degree to which people treat
themselves with warmth and understanding.People are not hard on themselves are treating themselves with
self-compassion.At one level, this might
feel similar to self-esteem, which is the degree to which people think of
themselves positively.But, you can
treat yourself with compassion without necessarily feeling positively toward
yourself.

In one study, the researchers manipulated people’s level of
self-compassion by having them think about a personal weakness or
shortcoming.The self-compassion group
wrote a paragraph about how they would talk to themselves about this weakness
from a perspective of compassion and understanding.A second group was given self-esteem
instructions. They were asked to write about talking to themselves about how to
validate their positive qualities.

After writing, participants were asked to rate the degree to
which they thought that the weakness they described was a permanent quality of
themselves or something that could be changed.The self-compassion group rated the weakness as more changeable than the
self-esteem group.

In another study in this series, participants took a
difficult vocabulary test.Before taking
the test, the self-compassion group was told not to be too hard on themselves
if they did poorly, while the control group was not.The test was hard enough that on average,
participants only got about 40% of the answers correct.After taking the test, participants were told
that they were going to take a second test later and were given time to study
before taking the test.The
self-compassion group studied 30% longer than the control group.

What does this mean?

There are two ways to interpret failure.One is to see failure as a reflection of who you
are.If you fail, then you yourself are
a failure.A second possibility is that
you see failure as a challenge to be overcome.

Self-compassion helps people to view failure as a
challenge.The way to overcome failure
is to try again and to work harder the next time.The studies suggest that self-compassion is
more likely than self-esteem to lead people to treat failures as
challenges.

This work also suggests that the culture of Silicon Valley
promoted self-compassion.Entrepreneurs
were taught to think of failure as a natural part of the business process and
not a reflection on their capabilities.In the long-run, this attitude may have played an important role in
making Silicon Valley the thriving hub of high-tech business that it is today.